Water & Acequia

I keep waiting to be ready. Put that first, because it's under everything else. I've been living as if a day is coming when I'll be finished — land bought, water secured, the pantry full, the man complete — and only then does the real life start. Broke as I am, scattered as I am, I've been grading every day against that finish line. And every night I lose, because the finish line isn't there. Nobody gets to be ready. I wrote that once and thought I understood it. I thought it

The Lessons of the Arghandab and the Tigris The greenest places I ever saw in two deployments were both river valleys. Both were where we did the most fighting. The Arghandab, west of Kandahar, runs through pomegranate orchards and grape rows. These lands have been irrigated the same way for longer than anyone can date precisely. A green corridor, maybe a mile wide, cuts into a landscape otherwise the color of a manila folder, stretching to the horizon. The Tigris and the Eup

Picture a two-megawatt unit humming in the mechanical room of Santa Fe Community College. Not a building. A closed box the size of a delivery truck, tucked next to the boilers, running inference and video processing for the college's own systems and a handful of regional partners. Its cooling loop comes out the other side at fifty degrees Celsius, piped straight into the campus heating system. In August, the surplus heat runs a greenhouse instead. Net water consumption: close

Understanding the Acequia System This week, I mapped every named acequia in my county. Not as a figure of speech. I pulled the State Engineer's public records — every point of diversion, every mapped ditch line — and joined them at a desk in Rio Arriba County, New Mexico. The count came back: 544 named acequias, ditches, and laterals. More than four thousand diversions tied to those named lines. Forty-two land grants with water still moving through them. Over thirteen thousan

A citizen's framework for siting American AI infrastructure before the basins decide for us. The question Washington is asking is where do we put the data centers. The question Washington should be asking is what does the watershed permit. I write from the upper Rio Grande, where ditches older than the republic still move water by gravity and consent — so I have seen what it looks like when a watershed is asked. That inversion is the entire argument. Right now, private capita

Grant County did the policy work. The watershed still paid. On January twenty-seventh of this year, the Grant County Public Utility District board met in Ephrata, Washington, and unanimously approved a power purchase agreement with a Houston natural gas company called VoltaGrid. The agreement authorizes a twelve-megawatt on-site gas turbine to be installed on the Vantage Data Centers campus in Quincy, behind the customer's own meter, to serve a single hyperscale tenant until

What Washington decides about American water is being decided without us. A note from the Llano ditch. I walked the Llano ditch this spring. The water was moving the way water moves in a ditch that has been moving water for a long time — slowly, with the small turbulences that say this is alive, under cottonwoods that have been drinking from it longer than the United States has had a constitution. The mayordomo who walked part of it with me did not need a clipboard. He knew w